The giant Kazakh miner is riven by conflict and fraud allegations. So why would its founders buy it back now?

Mehmet Dalman was taking a well-earned afternoon off when his phone rang on
Friday. The news had just hit the ticker. Alexander Mashkevitch and the
other two central Asian tycoons who founded ENRC were plotting a takeover of
the troubled FTSE 100 miner.

At any other company, Dalman, an ebullient former banker who was made the
£550,000-a-year chairman last year, might have been surprised. ENRC,
however, is not a normal company.

In a tumultuous past week and a half, the £3.3bn company has fired the law
firm that spent two years handling a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) probe into
hundreds of millions in questionable payments around the world. Jim
Cochrane, ENRC’s long-serving chief commercial officer, resigned days later
to “pursue other interests”. A mining manager in the company’s coal
operation in Mozambique was suspended without explanation. Dalman, brought
in to put the troubled company right, had himself threatened to quit.